The words we become

I was standing in front of a microphone with a pair of headphones that didn’t quite fit me. They kept sliding forward and needed my frequent adjustment to hold them into place. I was wearing my gold silk kimono with hand painted angel wings on the back. I had chosen this studio to record the audio version of REVEAL solely based on its name: Studio Unicorn. And because I had gotten that sense, that intuitive lurch when it’s profoundly kind owner reached out to me. He ended up being a Grammy award winning producer, and a devotee of Amma (the hugging saint I adore.) There was also a gorgeous mural of a mermaid inside the studio, so I felt right at home.

It’s an odd feeling to be brought to tears from your own writing. And, to laugh hard with the person you once were as well. It’s odd to meet with those truths you laid down in words so long ago. And to experience the reality that truth never expires. It doesn’t get old. Truth remains true. Our relation to our truth may shift. But when we can write down a truth that lives in us like a stowaway, for me, there’s nothing more fulfilling. And I know it’s the truth in returning to it because that zing, that bead of light it transmitted when I was first able to translate it into words still exists. After all these years, the truth I came to then still emits that volt, that current down my spine of feeling most alive.

There’s this expectation that we should be experts at something before writing a book about it. But for me, it’s the process of writing that alchemizes those lessons, those truths and allows me to finally integrate them. For me, a book is the commitment to becoming the words I set down. And in returning to REVEAL, I found that I had become these words. I had lived into each truth. I felt a pride that will be hard for me to describe. (But I like a challenge. So here it is.) The pride was so personal, so intimate. Only I can ever really know what it took to write REVEAL, what it took to live it. And by reading it out loud, in my angel wings, in this sacred little Studio Unicorn, I fell in love with every story I shared. Not because my writing is stellar, or because I uncover truths about being spiritual that others haven’t. I fell in love because of the radiant authenticity that lives in each word. This is me. This is my story of becoming whole, of remembering who I am.

So, every once in a while, Paul, the owner of the studio, would have to stop recording because what I had just read brought us both to tears. Or, he’d have to pause for us both to stop laughing– because of a story I shared in the book or because I tripped in a phenomenally hysterical way over one of the many Greek words in REVEAL, like, Homoousia, Hieros Gamos, and Kyrie Eleison. But all throughout the almost 6 hours of recording it took to read REVEAL, I was entirely present, feeling each word I read, and experiencing each truth as if I had just come to it in that moment. And I was falling in love with this book in a way I wasn’t capable of when I first wrote it. Back then, I was just so grateful to have had the chance to write it, to feel the weight lift from me once it was done. Because I had lived the life and written the book my soul had asked of me.

This time, in releasing the audiobook of REVEAL, I get to stand on a mountain (or my writing desk) and shout with a love I didn’t have for myself back then. A pride. I get to say with every ounce of me that this is what I offer you. The story of a woman reclaiming her body, and finding a way back to that unassuming voice of truth inside her. These are the words I have become. And the gratitude I have because of this is infinite.